The Professional Learning Journal of Calgary's Connect Charter School

Grade 9 Drama: Playwriting with Purpose

Last term, Drama specialist, Heather Melville decided to take her Grade 9 Drama class down a playwriting path with purpose. To begin with, Heather spoke to the Grades 4, 5 and 6 science teachers to find out where teachers were at in the curriculum. She then pulled the program of studies for these topics and distributed them to her grade 9 students. From there they talked about building creative characters and writing from the first person perspective. Students then went through the program of studies and did background research on the topics and looked at outcomes that would work well together.

In small groups, students began to build a short play that they would ultimately prepare to stage and perform to the elementary students. By studying examples of scripts, students were able to observe the importance of things such as punctuation, stage direction and formatting. In each stage of writing process, Heather would give feedback via google doc to each group for revisions. This project was ultimately about the process of play writing, and not the end point of performance. To view a copy of this task, click here.